


The Modern-Day Ghostbuster's Roadmap To Hell On Earth: Pandemonium and YOU

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Codependency - with GHOSTS!, F/F, F/M, Humanstuck, John Dies At The End - Freeform, M/M, Multi, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:14:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4127911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>	“Dave, if anything does me in it’s not gonna be the coffee.” And with nothing more said, he stickily peels himself off the floor to yet again shake a doorknob to no end. A lesson in futility. He props the torch on an old coat rack and sits with his legs tenting above your midsection in an upside down V. “So, you light the candles, I’ll go hop in the shower.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p> <i>	With bile in the back of your throat you can admit that you’ve been at this long enough to learn a thing or two. Ghost fun fact of the day: ghosts are fucking drama queens. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Modern-Day Ghostbuster's Roadmap To Hell On Earth: Pandemonium and YOU

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the first chapter of the fully-fleshed-out John Dies At The End crossover you've all been waiting for! Written and illustrated by me and the lovely (awful) Tess Quibbs. 
> 
> Things are going to start off very similar to the book, but in another chapter or two, things are going to veer off a TON. So strap yourself in for that wild ride, and enjoy!

“Lemme ask you something, Lalonde.”

“Go ahead.”

“So lets say you buy an axe from, I don’t know, Home Depot or some shit. It doesn’t really matter where you got it; it’s a sharp piece of metal stuck on top of some smoothed out wood that’s pretty much only one step up from a sharpened stick on the scale of tool complexity. Let’s also pretend for the sake of narration we live in some alternate universe where some wrinkled asscrack anthropologist dedicated his life to making a scale of tool complexity. So anyway, you find yourself with an axe and you’re chopping this dude’s head off.

Oh man, don’t give me that look. The asshole was already dead. I mean, I was the one who shot him, so I guess you could probably give me a look about that; but it’s not like this brick wall on steroids with filed down fangs and a fucking swastika tattoo was gonna be donating to any charities in the foreseeable future.

On the Anthropological Scale of Tool Complexity this poor fuck was pretty much at the top. Or the bottom. Whichever scientifically classifies him as being a complete and utterly inescapable wall of pure 100% toolage. Does complexity even define how much of a tool something is? There’s not really a lot of time to talk to someone when you’re sort of in this mutual situation of literally-trying-to-kill-each-other-right-now, so I don’t actually know how complex of a tool this guy was. I mean, shit, I don’t make assumptions. He could totally write flowery homoerotic poetry and read Nietzsche in his spare time. Who knows.

So anyway, you’re me and you’re standing in front of a corpse with literally eight fucking bullets in it, no exaggeration, and shit, this guy still look like he’s about to hop right back onto his feet and literally chew your fucking face off, so obviously you gotta chop the guys head off. You’d have to be at a level of intelligence so low it borders on mental retardation to let that noggin stay propped up there. I mean if creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night are all real, then hey, why not zombies? So you chop the guys head off and splinter your axe handle.

No big though. You just go to Home Depot and buy a new axe handle and make some totally bullshit comment about barbecue sauce when the guy at the counter starts getting a bit too curious about the dark red stains on the thing and bam, it’s fixed like fuckin’ new.

And then everything’s fine and dandy for a month or so until on one rainy spring morning you walk into your kitchen for like, a glass of water or some incredibly mundane bullshit like that, does it even matter? And there’s a slug. But like, a big one. At least a foot long with some pulsating egg sac on its ass ripped straight out of some oviposition hentai and looking as pissed off as a faceless blob of mucus can look. Then the snotbag just bites a fucking fork in half like he’s a dog chewing on a strip of bacon. Good boy, Fido, here’s your daily dosage of iron. So you grab your axe and you’re in the process of making jello shots out of the hellslug when, shock! You miss and hit your axe on the metal leg of your kitchen table which had been conveniently toppled over a couple of secs ago. You know. Forcover. Anyway, you got yourself a nice chip in the head. The axe’s head, not yours.

Another trip to home depot and you get home with your brand new shiny axe head and because you literally can _not catch_ a break, your old pal Mr. Decapitated Nazi is back with a hot new head and the same old meat-brick body. He’s giving you that special kind of look that just gives you the warm fuzzies, y’know, the whole ‘you’re the guy who killed me last winter’ glare, a real special occasion.

And then he opens his mouth and starts gurgling and yelling and shit and he says ‘that’s the same axe that beheaded me!’.”

“And . . . what exactly was your question, Dave? I’m 50% sure there’s not a point to this, but I’m willing to offer the benefit of the doubt.”

“ _Was he right?”_

* * *

It’s not far past four in the morning when your phone rings. No biggie, you were already awake. You don’t get much sleep anymore, and on the rare occasions you do, it’s more often than not during the daylight hours. It’s John. Calling you, you mean. It’s always John. You’d know it was him even if he hadn’t changed his personalized ringtone on your phone to ‘Karma Chameleon’.

_“I’M A MAN_  
_WHO DOESN’T KNOW_  
_HOW TO SELL_  
_A CONTRADICTION”_

You hang up on him. If he calls back, it’s important. If it doesn’t, that means he was drunk dialing you to talk about Pacific Rim again. No matter how many times you attempt to purge his apartment of Booze, he always finds a way to get completely trashed about once a week. He’s perfectly old enough to buy his own alcohol, of course, but you’re not really sure where he finds the _time_. Not to mention the money. You both work the same shitty job, and live in similarly shitty hovels. Yours at least being a borderline decrepit house you inherited rather than the realty equivalent of a roach motel.

Bec, previously gallivanting around the endless stretch of fucking _nothing_ around your ‘house’ bounds back to you for some indiscernible dog reasons and attempts to scramble on the plastic lawn chair next to yours. It’s a valiant struggle, and he ends up humping the chair a little bit as it scrapes loudly on the rotting deck wood. After a symphony of clattering and barking the chair is lying on the floor and you’re patting Bec on the head. Good job, boy, you got it.

John calls again.

“Hello?”

“Hey Dave!” No one should be that chipper at 4 am. “I’ve been keeping up with your blog recently.

A coded message on the off chance your phones had been tapped. Realistically, anyone who was tapping your phone would have just as easy a time intercepting your thought waves. These particular keyphrases meant ‘come to my place, it’s important’. They do not, and never will, mean that John actually keeps up with your blog. He doesn’t. You barely keep up with your blog anymore. It’s lost a bit of its flair since your middle school days.

“Also, pick up some cigarettes on the way here.” Meaning you are to stop and pick up some cigarettes on the way there. Your secret code pretty much starts and ends with John shitting on your blog.

“‘Kay.”

The phone goes silent and you set aside a good, solid minute reserved for sighing before you head out. You sit in the brisk front seat of your old beat up Bronco and wait for the air blowing on you to turn warm, but mostly you try not to think about Latula Pyrope. The thing about trying not to think of stuff is that, so often, it backfires miserably.

You don’t think about Latula Pyrope.

You turn on the radio, listening to the racist evangelical dickbag bitching about immigration because it’s the first thing on, and try to wake yourself up with his nasal droning. It’s like blunt knives right to your frontal lobe.

“ _They’re like rats, and they just keep coming and coming, these rats. You know what happens when you get too many rats on a ship? It sinks.”_

You don’t think boats actually work like that, but you also don’t think your truck should smell like a rotten egg. Did you leave food in here? You feel like you definitely didn’t, but you can’t always be right about everything. Who are you kidding, you can totally be right about everything. You didn’t leave food in your car, you remind yourself, because that would be stupid, and you aren’t a stupid person. Stupid people tend not to last long in your field, but you don’t spend much time dwelling on that. You don’t dwell on the sulphurous odor wafting from your vents either. You don’t think about that dark shape you maybe just saw in your rearview mirror or out of the corner of your eye. You turn your head and you don’t see anything, and you pretend that that means there can’t be anything there. You’re being paranoid, because it’s late and John’s not here to watch your back and-

You don’t think about Latula Pyrope.

She was a lawyer, a real successful big shot, and she was heading home from the office late one night, feeling free and invincible after a good day of work and the night air whipping around her. Green light glowing softly from her dashboard. Her freshly waxed Lexus shining in the night like smooth, black ice, or the shell of some impossibly lavish and rich beetle, if beetles had any sort of social hierarchy. Or like a Lexus with an Onyx finish. And then she feels a tickle on her leg, so she turns on the overhead light, mutes whatever weird chiptune music she was playing so she can pay attention. And then she sees the spiders.

Thousands of them.

More than should physically be able to fit in the space, really. Hand sized with sharp little legs like porcupine quills and spiny bodies like some jagged bastard child of a pinecone and a sea urchin; black, striped with a particular shade of toxic blue that just shrieks poison. Taking the cake were the uneven eyes, 7 on one side and one on the other. Bright yellow and _angry_. Pyrope panics and swerves and tumbles off the road into a ditch. When the cops come to yank her out of the gnarled mess of metal, there’s not a single sign of any spider.

Most people tend to write that kind of thing off as a bad night or hitting the sauce a bit too hard but the thing about that is, it didn’t _stop_. Latula Pyrope had found herself in a waking nightmare, plagued by demons inside and out. Shrink after shrink after doctor after expensive MRI and all the king’s horses and prescription medication couldn’t put a dent in the hallucinations.

That was the lawyer’s only problem, though. Outside of the occasional meltdown she was sharper than a tack and as sane as a sunset. She was still a dynamo in court, winning millions of dollars in suits and settlements. And yet, she would still swear on her life that she saw things. One day it was a writhing mass of tentacles, pooling out underneath the robes of His Honor, another, it would be writing on the walls - human blood. The one consistency in her life was always and only the spiders.

In a situation like that, your options are fairly limited in terms of assistance.

What do you do when you’re Latula Pyrope?

If you’re Dave Strider, you pull into the parking lot of John’s building and adjust yourself for the typical level of dread you begin to experience as you climb the stairs to his shitty third floor trash den of an apartment. You take a moment to appreciate the ass-like appearance of the dual hills in the distance with the sulfurous smog from the drain cleaner plant pouring out from between smooth and shapely cheeks. This provides a welcome but short term distraction from the fact that you are going to have to be inside of John’s apartment soon.

The thing about John’s apartment is that it’s never filthy, or anything. At the end of the day he’s a pretty neat guy, preferring to keep things in loosely categorized stacks than in either their proper places, or _complete_ bedlam. You think he just plain and simply has too much shit to be stored properly inside his postage-stamp-sized dwelling. That’s as much as can be said about it. If a raccoon with a passion for old newspaper clippings and outdated ghostbusters merchandise set up shop inside of an abandoned DVD rental shop that was then shrunk to the approximate size of a port-a-potty, it would look a little bit like John’s apartment.

He opens the door before you get the chance to slightly and satisfyingly disrupt his day by barging in with no warning. Point Egbert, again. Typical. Maybe by the end of the night you’ll at least be tied. He gestures towards his second hand sofa (sickeningly lime green, _christ_ ) upon which is an adorable and frightened looking young woman.

“Dave! Just in time. This is Aradia, and she needs our help.”

 _Our help_. The unspoken genie-wish twist to your entire friendship with John, because people like Aradia, people like Latula Pyrope, they don’t come to people like you unless they have a particular kind of issue. You and John, you have a specialty.

She couldn’t be a day over 20, with a wild mane of tight black curls that only served to make her seem even smaller than she was. Her skirt was long and black and torn at the bottom. Her fingers toyed with the hem as she stared up at you both, eyes peeking out through thick, dark lashes. They were a golden brown that seemed to glow, and maybe even had flecks of red, and the contrast against her deep black skin was incredible. She looked every part the typical damsel. Rescue me, take me home, keep me safe. Her entire aura leaking desperation.

To top it all off, a white bandage on her temple.

John steps into his ‘kitchen’ which boiled down to a few appliances haphazardly piled into an electrical rat’s nest that would make Smokey the Bear weep only, all crammed in a tiny corner of his apartment. He grabs a cup of coffee, smoothly slipping it into Aradia’s hands. Before you get the chance to warn her that a cup of John’s coffee is roughly as palatable as a bottle of apple juice that had been given the Little Monsters treatment, John turns on his I-am-an-adult voice and says, “So Aradia. Talk to us.”

You think John’s attempt at professionalism would be a little bit better off if the main feature in his apartment wasn’t a plasma TV the size of a Scandinavian nation surrounded by piles of more B list movies than you physically could or would want to watch in a lifetime. You do have to give him credit for being up and groomed at this time of night though. The guy legitimately treats what the two of you do like a business. He’d probably have business cards or special jackets made if you’d let him. He’d probably do it _without_ you letting him if he could spare the cash.

“It’s my boyfriend. He keeps - he keeps harassing me. It’s been going on for awhile now, and I’m scared to go home.” She’s eerily serene when she’s talking to you, slipping into a sheepish smile after she finishes talking.

She sips the coffee. Pulls a face. Sets it down on the table in front of her.

“Listen, Miss-”

“Medigo.”

“Medigo. Listen I feel for you, believe me, I do, but whatever kind of hulking, ‘roid raged asshole your boyfriend is, you’d probably have more luck with a women’s shelter than with me and my associate here. If you’re nervous, we’d be happy to call for you. I know a few in the area.” You offer.

She smiles again. “My boyfriend has been dead for a couple of months now.”

You make the terrible mistake of catching John’s eye and he grinds that shitty little manic pixie dream grin of his and quirks his eyebrow. _Look what I found, Dave! Isn’t this fun Dave?_ You hate that look. You hate him. You hate that you could, at any time, get up and leave the B-movie asshole with the ghost fetish to his business and go live your life, but for some reason, you don’t.

Why do you never just leave.

“A friend of mine told you deal with . . . _unusual_ problems.” She nudges a pile of John’s DVD’s out of the way and sets the cup of coffee down so it’s no longer in any sort of precarious proximity to her mouth. The way she keeps glaring at it out of the corner of her eye you’d think she was prepared for it to become sentient and crawl its way out of its container. That’s not actually too far fetched - it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve seen something along those lines. “They say you’re the best.”

 

You’re pretty sure ‘they’ have rather low standards, but business is business and you’re not about to publicly denounce such a glittering review. You suppose it isn’t hard to be the best when there’s nothing to compare to.

You walk over to one of the cushioned chairs in the corner of the room because apparently this is something you’re actually going to have to deal with tonight, and scoop out of a pile of John’s garbage (three decks of cards, a book on introductory computer programming for dummies, a leather bound bible) and dump it on the floor where it belongs. Good riddance. As you sit, a leg buckles and snaps, tilting you about 30 degrees and you’re forced to adjust yourself, pretending that you totally knew that was going to happen but you’re just too cool to give a shit.

“Okay, so when your boyfriend is getting all up in your face, you can see him, right?”

“Yes. And hear him. And . . . well, you know.” She brushes her thick, dark, curly hair so you can see her bandage better. Is she serious. Is she actually fucking serious?

“He hits you?”

“Yes.”

“With his fists?” Now, seeing real ghosts isn’t a common experience; but you’ve seen a few in your time, and you’ve never known them to punch people in the face.

“Yes.”

John abruptly slams his cup of black sludge on the table with an indignant gasp, soaking his hand and the surface rather thoroughly. “ _God_ , what a dick!”

“When it first happened, I mean, I never-”

“Believed in ghosts. Yeah yeah, we know.” You finish for her. Everyone always wants to appear as a credible skeptic. It doesn’t matter, though, even a mental patient would have to be desperate to come to you. “Look, Miss Medigo, I hate to tell you -”

“- but that sounds even MORE SERIOUS than we initially thought. Dave, I told Aradia here that we’d look into the matter tonight.” John cuts you off before you can say something rational and maybe buy yourself a little bit of sleep tonight. “He’s haunting her house out in [TOWN NAME REMOVED]. Let’s head out of the city for a bit, show this bastard what’s what.”

You feel a quick burst of irritation. John damn well knows that story is complete and utter bullshit. And then you realize: John damn well knows that story is complete and utter bullshit. Of course he does. He just didn’t care. John may be an idiot but for all he pretends, he’s not stupid. Dead boyfriend. Cute, scared girl. A chance for the two of you to play the hero and be the big, strong saviors. As per the usual, you aren’t sure if you should kick him in the dick or kiss him tenderly. You aren’t even sure which one you’d want either.

You desperately try to find an objection (does your desire to go to bed outweigh the chance of getting laid? Your age old conundrum.) but all of your thoughts keep cancelling each other out one by one. You pile yourselves into your truck, and head out of the city.

* * *

You insist on driving, John tells Aradia that she might have a concussion, but what neither of you were willing to admit out loud is that sometimes you still find yourselves thinking of Latula Pyrope, and her spiders, and it’s probably just not worth the risk even though Aradia’s story is a load of garbage.

You see, Latula might not find any sort of solace in this fact, but she’s part of an elite minority. One of very few keepers of the world’s nastiest secret.

Monsters, ghost, ghouls, phantoms, spectres, haunts, things that go bump in the night - whatever you want to call them - any kid whose intuition hasn’t been dulled by common sense could yell you their all real. The kicker is that they don’t quite work how you’re lead to believe. They thrive on the superstition, yes, but they don’t linger in dusty old boneyards, or abandoned asylums. They haunt minds.

Aradia sits in the passenger’s seat, staring blankly out the window. “You guys have been doing this for awhile, right? How do you even get into this sort of business?”

“We’ve been doing this on and off for a couple of years I guess.” John explains. “It’s kind of a long story how it all got started. Some guy died, then another guy, then we did some drugs. Now we get to see stuff! Sometimes there’s this dead cat that follows me around and, always meowing and wanting me to feed him. I named him Dr. Meowgon Spengler. Oh! And one time I was eating that sandwich and it starting moving on its own, opening like it was a mouth and flapping around like crazy. Remember that day, Dave?”

You grunt noncommittally. It hadn’t been _like_ a mouth, it was a mouth, and it got a good few bites in before John managed to subdue it by cramming the thing shut and continuing to eat it. John keeps trying to get you to go back to that restaurant because supposedly it tasted “really good, Dave!” but you don’t think the pro|con list weighs in his favor in this instance.

Aradia isn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to John anymore as he rambles on, but sometimes in the middle of an empty road, in the dead of night, John just needs some kind of a distraction. He keeps talking.

“I call it Malus’s Syndrome,” He had never called it that before. “You know, like from the movie Wicker Man? Because the thing we think we’re looking for is never actually the thing it is. Spoiler alert I guess, but anyway. Basically, I’m pretty sure that what Dave and I can do is see into Hell! Only it turns out that hell is just right here on Earth. Psych! It’s in us and around us in a perpetual maelstrom of horror, in every breath of air you inhale and in the hearts of everyone you see around you, lurking, waiting for some sort of catalyst. Hey look, an owl!”

You all look. It’s an owl alright.

“So basically,” You cut in before John can say any more words, or bring up another Nicolas Cage film. “We started doing a few favors and word gets around.”

You really just wanted to make sure that John doesn’t get to the part of the story where he mentions offhandedly how he kept eating the snapping sandwich despite it’s constant grab for his fingers, right down to the last slice of tomato.

Your house is on the way thankfully, and you stop for supplies, leaving the truck running with John and Aradia still inside as you skip the house all together and head into the rickety wooden shed in the backyard. You scan the shelves with your flashlight and a variety of odds and ends pilfered from your little favors greet you:

A stuffed Winnie the Pooh doll (dried blood crusted around the eyes);

A taxidermied badgerconda (part badger, part anaconda, all unholy devilspawn);

An oversized mason jar filled with formaldehyde that has a clump of cockroaches floating inside, approximately 6 inches high and in the crude shape of a human hand.

You grab a torch that looked like it was ripped out of the pages of a medieval history textbook. John stole it from a theme restaurant. Then you grab a squeeze bottle full of gelatinous green liquid, weighing it in your hand for a moment. You reconsider, putting it down and grabbing your vintage ghetto blaster; a standing tribute to the late 80s and a work of art in its own right.

You go back into the house, call Bec, and grab some of the rubbery pink chunks from the tub in the cabinet before getting back into the car, with Bec, of course, at your heels.

Aradia’s house was a simple two story farmhouse, alone on a barren patch of turf in a sea of forlorn looking cornfields, long flattened by the last harvest. You walk past a mailbox shaped like a ram, and the front door has hand painted letters in a deep red (eerily similar to dried blood but, in all likeliness, just red paint), that reads THE MEGIDO’S - ESTABLISHED 1963.

You and John take more than a polite amount of moments to discuss whether or not the apostrophe belongs there. Meanwhile, something is nagging at you. You have the sinking (and of course, familiar) feeling that if you had any semblance of a brain you’d turn and flee right now.

You fish one of the pink, steak-shaped (complete with grill lines) dog treats out of your pocket, realizing that dogs do not have a concept of grills. The grill lines are there entirely for the benefit of you, the dog owner (wait, shit, Bec isn’t actually your dog? you should probably give him back soon). Becquerel would never appreciate the artistry that went into mimicking the appearance of a miniaturized cut of premium meat.

“Bec, c’mere you little devilbeast!”

You shake the treat in front of his snout and throw it through the open door into the dark, waiting house. He bolts after it like a bat out of hell, _damn_ that dog is fast.

The three of you wait patiently for the melodious sound of cut off barks or splattering dogflesh, but the only sound to speak of is Bec’s paws clacking against the flooring as he returns for more small steaks. You decide its probably safe to go in.

Aradia pats Bec sympathetically.

You step into the dark living room and Aradia makes a movie to turn on the light, but you grab her hand before she can. John brings his lighter up to the head of the torch and a flame about a foot high erupts from it. He makes a shushing gesture as he leads you and Aradia to creep silently through the house. You notice John has a thermos of coffee with him, branding this as an all nighter.

The one good thing about John’s coffee: the horrific, esophagus burning sting of it drooling down your throat certainly kept the soft blackness of sleep at bay.

“Where do you see him, mostly?” You ask. Aradia stars fidgeting with her skirt again.

“The basement mostly. I don’t want to go down there though . . . Oh and, I saw him in the bathroom once. His hand came up, uh, through the toilet-”

“Show us the way to the basement.”

“The door’s in the kitchen, but -”

“It’s cool, you and Bec can stay up here,” John interrupts. “We can go check it out.”

You glance quickly at John because, shouldn’t that have been your line? You as the dashing, knightly protector come to fight off the ghosts. You step through the door to the basement, clomping down the rickety wooden stairs.

It’s a nice, modern basement with a washer and dryer, the hot water heater making gentle ticking noises from the corner. A floor freezer that’s about level with your waist. A few shelves. Tall, metal ones lining the room with a variety of boxes and other shit you don’t care about piled on.

“He’s not here.” John says.

“Yeah holy shit, surprise of the century there. I’m filled to the brim with completely legitimate shock, which is real.”

John lights a cigarette with the torch.

“She seems like such a nice girl, doesn’t she?” John says softly and you can hear the smarmy wink in his voice. “You know, she reminds me of Meulin, Roxy’s friend, y’know? When she came to my door I kind of thought it was her. By the way dude, thanks for agreeing to come along on this with me, you’re a good wingman bro. I mean, I’m not saying I’m gonna take advantage of her distress or anything! But . . .”

You stop listening to John. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong and you can’t quite find it, like a piece of chip stuck between two of your teeth, or some stray remnant of last night’s dreams. John is acting all detectivey now, investigating an off-white bundle of fabric draped over the edge of a large sink.

“Ohhhh yeah,” He says, pulling up the length of cloth and sounding just a little bit too into this. “Look at this beauty right here.”

The cloth is an apron, stained a faded pink in a large, splattered blob in the center where old blood had been washed out a long time ago.

You turn to the large freezer and your insides go cold and sink into your shoes with that same old dread. You sigh and it comes out a good bit shakier than you’d like. “John, have I ever mentioned how much I fucking hate you?” You stride over to the freezer and, without much further ado open the lid.

The first thing you see is a tongue. Rubbery and purple and a inhuman in its length and shape, ziplocked and covered in frost. The freezer was filled with similar chunks of flesh, some in bags, some wrapped in pink tinted paper. Some clear tubs of straight up entrails. Butcher paper. White apron. Meat in the freezer.

“Well!” John announces boldly. “I think it’s obvious. All those stories about UFOs that go around murdering cows? Obviously, my dear friend, we have solved the unsolvable mystery. To think it was old man Medigo the whole time.”

You sigh again.

“It’s a deer, jackass. Her dad probably hunts, and they keep the meat. And besides, I’m pretty sure she said her name was Megido.”

You dig through the meat freezer checking for anything corpse-y but ony find more meat. Turkey. Sausages. A few animal parts, complete with skin. Et cetera. You close the lid and feel a little but stupider than you felt a few minutes earlier, though probably not for the reasons you should be feeling stupid. It’s late and you haven’t slept and you want to go home because you just can’t _think_.

John starts poking through cabinets and you look around for your boom box. You didn’t bring it down. You left it upstairs with Aradia, and that _shouldn’t_ bother you but it _does_ and why can’t you THINK.

“Hey Dave! Remember that guy whose basement got flooded then he called us and swore there was a fifteen foot great white down there?”

You do remember. You don’t answer, desperately trying to latch on to your train of thought like a feather being blown in the wind as you run after it. The guy was a bit of a crybaby, really. When you had got there it was just an eight foot tiger shark. Your garden variety basement marine mammal. Probably doesn’t even eat people. ...Are sharks mammals? You don’t really know. You told the guy to wait until the water drained out and call you back, and lo and behold the shark was gone with the water. Almost like it had evaporated into thin air or leaked out through the cracks.

Oh god why can’t you focus on any one thing anymore? Pay attention god damn it. Something is wrong here. One of these things is not like the other.

You pull yourself off the shark tangent and think about the boombox again. John had bought it at a garage sale and given it to you as a present and-

_Wait just a god damned second._

“John, you told me you thought Aradia looked like Meulin?”

“Yeah.”

“John, Meulin’s like, my height. Asian. With tits the size of her head.”

“Yeah I know, totally cute right? I mean-”

“And you think Aradia, the girl upstairs, looks like her?”

“Yeah.” John turns to me with an increasingly sick look on his face, because John may be a bit of an idiot, but he’s not stupid, and he’s definitely getting it.

“John, Aradia is _tiny_. And more pressingly, black.”

_They haunt minds._

John sighs his sigh that without fail always reminds you of a dad, plucks out his cigarette, and flings it onto the floor. You head for the stairs and get up one step before you freeze. Aradia sits perched comfortably on the middlemost of the creaking steps, arm wrapped loosely on Bec’s muzzle, a that same just-too-big smile from earlier on her face.

“Hey Aradia!” John chirps, stepping onto the third stair because that fucker is crazy. “Everything looks okay down here so far. We just have a few questions while we check out the rest of the house, y’know? Standard protocol stuff.”

“That’s okay with me.” She says placidly. In the pause that follows your realize that John is, of course, putting this one on your shoulders, thanks bro.

“So first can you tell us your full name? For the record, I mean. Gotta have the deets on lock when you’re in this kind of biz.” Lie. Nothing is ‘on lock’ in this line of work. You’ve even stopped locking the doors to your house, everything but the shed. It doesn’t make a difference.

“Aradia Medigo.” She states.

“Alright, cool. So, another thing. Could you describe your own appearance for me?” You ask.

“That doesn’t seem very necessary.”

“Sorry, we don’t make the rules!” John cuts in. Yes, yes you do. “It’s like, getting your driver’s license, you know? Hair color, eye color, height. Stuff like that, for the records.”

“Okay,” the smile isn’t quite there anymore, but to her credit, she tries. “I still don’t understand why you have to ask me! You are looking at my right now.”

“See the thing about that,” you add. “Is that my good friend John here has quite the affinity for ghosts.”

“It’s true!”

“Honestly, jobs like this are borderline erotic for him. Ten bucks says he’s going to make a deposit directly into the spank bank when he gets back to his damp cardboard box of an apartment-”

“-Less true.”

“-and all of this frequent and violent beating of his meat has been the catalyst for some unfortunate and preemptive loss of eyesight.” You flick his glasses for good measure. “So basically, right now, he and I are seeing two completely different versions of you and I’m kinda wondering what you actually look like. I mean, we were just gonna flip a coin and let that be the d-”

She burst into frogs.

Here one second gone the next, her flesh transmogrifying into a swarm of amphibians in the millisecond between your heartbeats. They instantly begin hopping out in every direction, a writhing sea of slick maroon bodies dotted with milky white eyes. A few of the damn things held traces of their previous form. A few clumps of thick, brown hair grew out of the back of one. Others held the distinct pattern of her skirt’s fabric. One in particular held an entire human eyeball embedded within its back. It blinks. The sclera is the same reddish gold as before. It makes eye contact with you, strangely intense and accusatory.

You give it a solid kick for good measure.

In fact, you let yourself go hog wild and punt a few of the slimy bastards into the wall as they scamper away. They slip through cracks in the wall and between the stairs like mist. John picks one up.

“John.”

“What.”

“John, put the frog down.”

He stares at it.

“Why?”

“Christ,” you spit out at him. “John. It’s evil. It’s probably, like, a god damned demon frog from the beyond the veil.”

“Okay, but. I think you are not considering the fact that this is a really cool frog. Also, her name is Tonya, and she lives with me now.” Tonya croaks, and flails her extremities wildly. “See? We’re bonding already.”

“It’s a _monster_. Get rid of it.”

He looks between you and the hellfrog like he’s hoping it’ll weigh in.

“I know for a fact you can’t have pets in your apartment.”

At that, he sighs and drops it and slinks off, presumable to reunite with its frog brethren and haunt the shit out of you. Bec chooses that moment to get himself riled up and give a warning bark to the intruding amphibian.

Sometimes you want one of John’s manic fits of poor decision making to backfire on him, but you’re not holding your breath. There’s also a decent chance that such a situation would end up with both of you dead, and you’re not sure how into that concept you are. You’ll give it about 50/50.

He walks up to the door and gives the knob a merely half-hearted jiggle, because the odds that you aren’t trapped in this disgusting murder basement are cripplingly low. You give him props for trying. Ever the optimist.

And then, because _why the fuck not_ the room is filled with this horrible sucking noise like a bathtub stop being yanked out, followed by a squelch of epic proportions. Blood begins politely gushing out of the drain in the center of the room.

You love life.

It takes approximately 4 and a half seconds for the liquid to crest over the sole of your shoes and you’re just sort of standing there appreciatively while, John beelines towards the freezer. He manages a rather skilled leap right on top of it despite the blood lapping at his ankles. He’s got that look on his face - the one you hate, the same one from earlier that night - that says ‘Aha, yes! this was a Good Idea.” You patiently await his master plan to manifest, but he just sort of sits there.

“Well?” He asks. “What are you going to do? C’mon, man, get us out of here I am not in the mood for a literal bloodbath.”

Instead of dignifying that with a response (in retrospect you should have at least told him to go fuck himself) you crawl up onto the freezer and glance around.

“Bam. Air duct.” He follows the pointing of your finger and nods happily. The blood is lapping about halfway up the side of the freezer by now. “Only problem is, we’re gonna have to chart a course through about a foot and a half of blood.”

“Or - and this is just a suggestion - _or_ , we could -” CRASH! John braces himself against the wall backing the freezer and shoves into the nearest shelf, sending them all careening down in a spiral like dominos. They end up stacked together in an impressively convenient semblance of a horizontal staircase.

It doesn’t take you long to break open the air vent, sitting on John’s shoulders while he straddles two shelving units. One awkward scramble up and a hand reached down later, you’re both lying on the living room floor. Filthy, but unharmed. Bec, true to his elusive nature that you can’t really bring yourself to give a shit about, has made his way into the living room and sniffles at your hand.

You: 1 Ghosts: 0

“You think the blood’s gonna keep rising?” He asks.

“Probably.”

“Might as well go open the front door, let it drain out.”

“If that door is unlocked we are getting in my car, driving to my desert, I am going to leave you in the desert, and then I’m headed back to my house for a shower and coffee that wasn’t made with piss instead of water. If it can’t be opened I swear to whatever higher power exists and insists on fucking me over that I’m gonna draw a crude one point perspective landscape on it and roadrunner my ass into some slapstick pocket dimension.”

“I use monster energy.” He says.

“What?”

“In the coffee. And caffeine pills, ground up in there. Tastes pretty awful, but it’s a good pick me up!”

“How are you not dead yet?” Why have you let him feed you this _swill_. “How has your heart not reached the speed where it propels blood out of your fingertips like a supersoaker in mid July.”

“Dave, if anything does me in it’s not gonna be the coffee.” And with nothing more said, he stickily peels himself off the floor to yet again shake a doorknob to no end. A lesson in futility. He props the torch on an old coat rack and sits with his legs tenting above your midsection in an upside down V. “So, you light the candles, I’ll go hop in the shower.”

With bile in the back of your throat you can admit that you’ve been at this long enough to learn a thing or two. Ghost fun fact of the day: ghosts are fucking drama queens.

Bec tails you back to your pile of stuff - the boom box, your travel mugs, a few other odds and ends - and you spend a few minutes digging through until you find your lighter and a handful of votives. You spread them out. Just a few here and there, enough to make it spooky. They eat that shit up.

Gentle piano music spills eerily from the ghetto blaster. It’s slower than it should be and you’re pretty sure that’s because John pulled some entry level remastering and warped some classical music into whatever this monstrosity is. It sets you on edge. The notes and rhythms are familiar in their own right but you couldn’t on your life place the original songs. This particular playlist is never used for anything but this, either. The neural pathways of your brain have conveniently knotted these melodies together with sickening impatience and dread. Like a gaggle of girl scouts in your head making braids out of your thoughts and twisting everything to the point where it seems like you can’t think of anything. Not without the fear being there too. Like a -

Like -

God, you can’t get your thoughts straight.

It is 4:03 in the morning.

These stakeouts have a habit of dragging on. Hours, days, one time it was a week and a half trapped in the ever-shifting halls of an abandoned motel 8. Ghosts are drama queens, and they’ve got nothing but time.

Time. Time time time. Something stirs in your head and you don’t even try following the dragon down that rabbit hole, or whateverthefuck the expression is.

God, you really need some sleep, you don’t get much of it these days.

You stumble into the first bedroom you find and kick off your bloodied shoes, set your shades on a bedside table, and just kind of lay there on top of the sheets for a moment.

John is down the hall somewhere in the bathroom, bellowing his lungs out.

“Oh no!!! I am all naked and alone in this poorly lit house.” His punctuation of choice, a dramatic sigh. “I think I will go investigate this spooky business . . . it’s too bad I don’t have time to put my clothes back on!”

You almost wish you could bring yourself to find some kind of humor in it.

Bec is snoring softly, curled around your feet, and John is humming in the shower vaguely in tune with the b-movie slasher soundtrack piano music and your mind drifts off to the sound of running water until the bed dips. Creaking springs and shifting sheets sending your spine stick-straight and it’s John, hair still wet, dressed in the same stained jeans and t shirt from earlier.

“Graceful, much.” You mutter at him “There’s other beds in here.” Probably.

He laughs. Yawns.

“Yeah.”

* * *

You don’t wake up until you feel Bec scratching at your hand from where it’s draped over the side of the bed. The bastard’s always hungry, you swear, and honestly you sort of wish Jade would suddenly decide she wants her dog back so you could wash your hands of him all together.

There’s a nonchalant series of scuffling noises from the living room. John’s still asleep and you’re nothing if not a fucking _great_ friend and, groggy still (7:18 am) you pry yourself from the bed to deal with it. There’s the sound of shattering china and you’re pretty sure that next noise is what you’d describe as a growl.

The guilty party is a dog approximately the size of a bear sticking his fucking face into a cabinet where a singular fly is buzzing around.

One of these days the dog is _actually_ going to be eaten when you send it scouting and you’ll propose to whatever spectre was responsible on the spot. Maybe you’d let the property destruction pass if he hadn’t fucked up your nap.

In a testament to how fucking _stupid_ you are it takes you a minute to actually process this thought despite the fact that your feet are already carrying you back to the bedroom. Bec scratched you awake and then you walked into the living room and there he was and _god_ , you’re an idiot.

John sits on the bed, cross-legged in a pile of crusted blood, fumbling to light his cigarette while he stares at the floor. It’s like . . . like someone smashed a music box and threw it in the dumpster of a deli, then poured the amalgam onto the floor. Meat and viscera slink like slugs across the floorboards, surrounding by rolling bits of clockwork and twisted metal. You sit down next to him to let the macabre performance unfold.

“Mornin.” he says between drags.

“Hey.”

“Cool ghost.” He points to the floor.

“Yeah.”

It becomes shortly evident that the material is assembling itself into some sort of vaguely humanoid form. Tubes of sausage (from the basement freezer?) wrapped in entrails warp themselves into limbs, to then be secured with rusted scrap metal and crumbling gears for joints. The piece de resistance, in your opinion, is the completely intact and disturbingly fresh ram’s head. It wobbles its way to the feet of what has now become an edible steampunk chimera, only to be picked up and place on top of the thing’s ‘shoulders’.

It glares at you, all glassy eyes and bloody neckstump, almost like it’s going to start talking.

“YOU!!!!” It booms, because of course it talks, mouth flying open with a spray of spittle.

The voice is surprisingly feminine, not too far off from Aradia’s voice back when she was pretending to be a person. If you took that voice, copied it a few hundred times, changed the pitches around, and then layered the whole kit n caboodle together, that would give you a rough estimate of what the meatghost sounds like. That voice, but hollower, like it was played through a megaphone carved out of stone.

“No longer shall you torment me,” it accuses. You think you’d remember this if it had happened before, tbh. “Prepare to MEAT YOUR DOOM!”

You actually can’t say for certain whether it said ‘meet’ or ‘meat’ but you’d like to at least pretend it was the latter. You grab John’s arm and the two of you are running and the gore monster is following. On one hand, it’s about 7 and a half feet tall, so it’s got the long leg bonus going for it, but its cobbled-together form has a little bit of trouble running.

You call it even.

As you’ve already established, you’re an idiot, so it’s not long until you’ve run yourself into a dead end and the meat maiden corners you. Cold, greasy fingers find purchase around your neck, and you and John are both hoisted into the air.

“You disappoint me.” She says. “After all the times we have dueled, from the beaches of Barbados to -” blah, blah blah, you have no idea what the fuck she’s talking about, so you just kind of tune it out while you focus on not dying. John’s trying to use the wall as leverage and pry himself free but it’s not doing much more than giving him something to focus on. You suppose that alone has its merit.

And then Bec decides that now would be a good time to come careening down the hallway, leaping full force at the clockwork sending, teeth first, sinking his mouth around one of her ankles. She shrieks and you come tumbling to the floor.

You push off from the wall and slide under her like a baseball player. A small part of you wishes you could have seen that happen from the outside because it was definitely sick as hell. John settles for pulling himself off of his ass and shoulder checking her into an armoire before she can regain her balance.

You beeline for the stereo and hold it over your shoulder while John manically flips through the case to find the right cd. You’re half-tumbling down the stairs into the miraculously dry basement to buy time before John manages to get his act together.

_In between_  
_What I find is pleasing and I'm feeling fine_  
_Love is so confusing there's no peace of mind_  
_If I fear I'm losing you it's just no good_  
_You teasing like you do_

The spirit shrieks, its pursuit slowing (still not halting, damn this one’s good) as it claws at its own ears. Chunks of flesh and fur litter the ground like a trail of breadcrumbs.

_Once I had a love and it was a gas_  
_Soon turned out had a heart of glass_

“You can’t defeat me like this!” She howls. “Your enchantress and her spelled tongue can only aid you so much.”

_Seemed like the real thing, only to find_  
_Mucho mistrust, love's gone behind_

She smacks the stereo off of your shoulder and it shatters like ceramic against the concrete. Blondie screeches to a halt, another comrade fallen. You make a note to give the stereo a proper viking burial at sea once you escape the murder house. While you’re entertaining this thought, John is punching the ghost in the face.

It’s not making a huge effect but it’s more of a distraction technique than anything else, and it gives you time. You grab a bottle of lighter fluid from the wreckage of the shelves John toppled over and soak the undead bitch. Despite being a bit occupied, the two of you have a decent amount of ghost fighting experience under your belts, and an even longer history of setting shit on fire. He tosses you his lighter without breaking stride, bracing his back against the freezer to push against the ram ghost with his legs. She’s flung against the opposite wall.

One spark. That’s all it takes for the room to be filled with the smell of cooking meat. Conveniently, Bec finds his way to the party shortly after.

To her credit the bitch does _not_ go down.

“LALONDE! I will-”

“Wait? Lalonde?” You ask. Despite being on fire the ghost stops its screaming and ranting briefly.

“Yes.” She answers, like you’re the idiot here.

“Doctor - slash - Madame Lalonde? The chick who runs those cheesy ass summoning shows on the Discovery channel?”

“Yes.”

“Oooh . . .” winces John. “Yeah, that’s not us.”

“Are you sure?” She asks.

“Yes I’m fucking sure!” What a huge waste of time. All of this. “Rose is like, shit, 5’3 on a good day. A _woman_. Not me. At all.”

“Well, I mean you’re both blonde-”

“John you’re really not helping.”

“I’m just saying, like, you kinda have similar facial structures, the cheek bones and-”

“ _John_.”

Meat lady busies herself trying to pat out some of the flames and honestly the whole situation is just _awkward_. It’s like when you’re in the grocery store and you go up to someone you think you know and say hello, but it was a complete stranger, who you are currently trying to murder. And then the stranger sets you on fire. It’s just like that.

“You are not Lalonde.” She finally settles.

“Yeah, no, sorry, your nemesis is probably off performing some weird tea ceremony to speak with cthulhu or something.” You answer.

“We know Rose though!” John adds. “Pretty well.” That’s one way to put it. “We could get you in touch with her and then you could let us go and this whole mess will just be water under the bridge!”

“Um. Okay.” She says. “I’m okay with that. But just to let you know, your deaths are coming too. The master of Death makes no bargains.”

“Yeah, sure, sure, whatever. Death. Got it.”

Before you can even reach into your pocket your phone starts ringing, god, god you hate Lalonde sometimes. You pass the phone over to your new acquaintance and the manages to actually answer the damn thing, impressively enough.

“Rose Lalonde! You thought I had been vanquish-”

She’s instantaneously seared away in a flash of gold light, leaving nothing but two curled horns in a pile of ash. You pick them up to add to the rest of your collection and John just sort of sits down on the floor.

“That was really stupid.” He says.

“Yeah.”  
* * *

The next attempt finds the front door unlocked and you gather up your stuff to leave but John insists on at least tidying up a little bit.

He points to the photographs on the walls and _people do live here, you know!! It’s not all about you Dave_ and so you end up scrubbing blood out of some rando’s carpet. The family in the pictures is a small one, just three women, all with large masses of wavy hair and deep tan skin, the kind that comes from blood rather than the sun. You can’t help but stare at them while you scour their house.

You wonder where they are.

The sun is lazily dipping back below the horizon by the time you and John pull into the parking lot of the nearest Perkins for your first meal in the past two days.

**Author's Note:**

> 


End file.
